Princess Castle Cake

Last weekend I spent a solid 12 hours making a princess castle cake for the birthday of a very special one-year old Princess!

Here is our inspiration from the Wilton Yearbook:

We bought the Wilton Romantic Castle Cake Kit which includes all the plastic pieces needed to make your cake look like a castle!  Since we didn’t need a cake this big, we opted to do three layers—12”, 9” and 6”.  Here’s a photo reel of the process:

That’s me drilling holes in each tower for a dowel rod support.

The top two layers iced and ready to be decorated, just chilling on the pool table.  What, you don’t use your pool table to store cake parts, too??  We made the layers with Betty Crocker white cake mix (the best!) and I whipped up three batches of Snow White Buttercream frosting from the Wilton website.  (That’s nine pounds of confectioner’s sugar… you should have seen the mess in the kitchen!) Then we tinted it pink and green for the decorations.

The two lower layers were stabilized with dowel supports in the center.  Here’s the bottom with its first layer of frosting—pink flower swags.  I used the drop flower tip for those… easy peasy, just lots of them!

Adding the leaves.

And the centers.

Layer up.  Windows and doors went on with a bit of icing.  Since our second tier was smaller than the pattern, we had to cut out a spot in the top tier for the roof piece to fit in.  Each tier was on a cardboard round for support and to make it easier to deconstruct the cake for cutting.

I pre-decorated the towers on top and sides before putting them on the cake.  With great trepidation, I stuck the top towers in with icing “glue” and then frosted around them. 

A few climbing vines finished off the edges of the roof.

After placing the remaining towers on the middle layer, and smushing everything in place with “glue”, I just had to finish the flower border at the base of the tier.  That’s it… I’m done!!!  (Much celebrating ensued… especially since it was about 10 o’clock at night and I was very tired!) :)

Here’s the finished product, ready to deliver to the party.  We split the corners of a box and slid the cake in, then taped the sides back up so we could remove it easily.  The frosting hardened overnight and the cake was very solid for its journey to the party.  (We called it “cement” icing, and I joked about “caulking” all the windows and doors…. No drafty castles for me!)  Despite the great weight of the cake and all those protruding towers, we had no trouble transporting it and none of my nightmares about tripping or smashing my elbow into it came to fruition.  Hallelujah! 

Here is the little cupcake (actually a big cupcake!) that we made especially for the birthday girl:

Ah, masterpiece…